At the beginning of February, Slam Corp. — a SPAC backed by Alex Rodriguez — announced its intention to go public through a $500 million IPO. Less than a month later, A-Rod & Co. have reached their goal. 

The blank-check company, which is also backed by hedge fund Antara Capital, announced it has raised $500 million by offering 50 million units at $10 each. The units include one share of common stock and one-fourth of a warrant.

Under Nasdaq ticker SLAMU, the SPAC plans to target acquisitions in the “sports, media, entertainment, health, and consumer technology sectors,” according to its prospectus.

While the SPAC doesn’t plan to buy into professional sports teams, retired Walmart e-commerce chief Marc Lore, who has expressed interest in buying a team, is a special advisor to the SPAC.

Slam started trading publicly today, and its IPO is expected to close on Feb. 25, 2021. As of last week, SPACs had already raised $38 billion in 2021 — nearly half of the record $83 billion raised in 2020.

In December, A-Rod also joined Miami-based private equity firm CGI Merchant Group to invest in hotels. The group is looking to raise $650 million.

With limited ways to bring in a windfall, Germany’s top soccer league hopes to start a bidding war on its media rights.

Bundesliga is soliciting bids for a minority stake in its overseas broadcast rights. The league could be in touch with as many as 30 investors this week.

“There is sure to be a lot of interest,” Doug Harmer, a partner at Oakwell Sports Advisory who is working with a potential bidder, told Bloomberg. “This is a well-run league from a fiscal perspective, but you would ask whether more could be done to make it a more international product.”

The league could use the cash. An estimate from December 2020 had the Bundesliga losing $1.21 billion in revenue in the 2020-21 season, compared to previous seasons.

• Deloitte estimated that the league brought in $1.86 billion in annual broadcasting revenue prior to the pandemic. The firm also calculated its international broadcasting rights to be worth $292 million per year, compared to the Premier League’s $1.94 billion and La Liga’s $1.09 billion.
• Bundesliga embraced the potential of new media in early February via a deal with Amazon Web Services in which the tech giant provides real-time stats, outcome predictions, and highlights for fans.
• In December, the league responded to its fiscal uncertainty by reconfiguring its distribution scheme to share broadcasting revenue more evenly among its clubs.

Advent International and BC Partners, no strangers to high-profile sports investments, have already been in touch regarding the overseas rights, and there has been speculation that Bain Capital, CVC Capital Partners, General Atlantic and KKR & Co. could get in on the action.

PlayStation has relaunched its Play at Home initiative. 

Since its debut last April, Play at Home has been PlayStation’s method of promoting safe health practices during the pandemic. The program also supports small independent game studios through a $10 million fund.

Play at Home is offered to PlayStation gamers free of charge as an alternative to its PS Plus service, which has 47.4 million paying subscribers worldwide. PS Plus competes more directly with Xbox Game Pass, which has 18 million subscribers. 

The first game available through Play at Home, “Uncharted: The Nathan Drake Collection,” was downloaded 10 million times last year. The upcoming round starts with the PS4 version of “Ratchet & Clank” on March 1. 

The company also announced a new VR headset and controller for PS5, though its release is a ways off. “There’s still a lot of development underway for our new VR system, so it won’t be launching in 2021,” said Sony executive Hideaki Nishino.

As for those PS5 shortage issues? “Demand was greater than we anticipated,” PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan said. “That, along with the complexities of the supply chain issues, resulted in a slightly lower supply than we initially anticipated.”

Sony recently reported that 4.5 million PS5 units were sold in November and December. Ryan says the company wants to sell more PS5s in 2021 than the 14.9 million units PS4 sold in its first year.